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Ran Alert – Ranneko plays Spoiler Alert

It took me a while to figure out what game to record for today, but I am really glad I picked Spoiler Alert it really hit the spot. It has leans very heavily on a single gimmick, it has barely acceptable controls and it doesn’t hang around long enough for these pretty glaring flaws to be a problem.

Instead I got to spend a pretty fun half hour making my way through all the levels and see how they played with the idea of playing a platformer backwards. You could probably do significantly more with this if you wanted to, especially if you were trying to make an actual platformer rather than an autorunner. During the video I wonder if that would work. Especially as a kind of competitive game, player 1 finishes a level then player 2 has to undo it by playing in reverse. It could lead to some interesting strategies especially regarding when and where collectibles are picked up.

I think it would be interesting, but I am not sure if it would be fun.

3 comments

One thing they could have done would be to invert the difficulty curve, as in a normal game the end of world 3 would be the trickiest bit, not world 1-1. It certainly wouldn’t be the first game to get easier at you progress – early levels in Skyrim, for example, can pose a challenge, but your power rises much faster than the level scaling can cope with.

Oh, it’d certainly be a bold move, as there really aren’t that any games that deliberately invert the curve, even if some manage it accidentally. It’s possible that we’d end up with a Dark Souls scenario – many players get frustrated and give up, but the ones that wade through all that crap and ‘git gud’ see a world full of possibilities unroll before their very eyes.